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As Steve Jobs once pointed out, those jobs are never coming back. All of which means that those with some sort of nostalgia for the days when a blue collar job in a factory was what awaited a significant portion of the workforce are going to be disappointed.

Now, companies that want to make things here often have trouble finding qualified workers for specialized jobs and American-made components for their products. And politicians’ promises that American manufacturing means an abundance of new jobs is complicated — yes, it means jobs, but on nowhere near the scale there was before, because machines have replaced humans at almost every point in the production process.

Take Parkdale: The mill here produces 2.5 million pounds of yarn a week with about 140 workers. In 1980, that production level would have required more than 2,000 people.

The piece as a whole is worth reading. It's good on the points that are making people think about recalling production back from overseas and into the US again. As foreign wages have risen (Chinese most especially) the gap between them and US wages has fallen. Transport costs have risen along with the oil price, there's a value in being closer to the market and in having a shorter turn around time. Even the capital cost of having stock in the production pipeline can be reduced.

So for some production, of some products, manufacturing in the US is again making sense as it hasn't for the past 10 or 15 years. However, as Jobs himself pointed out, that doesn't mean that the jobs are all about to come back. Simply because there are very few jobs that have not been automated in manufacturing these days. See that fall from 3,000 jobs to 140 for the same production above.

Indeed, we could even make a case that all that offshoring of work hasn't made the slightest difference to the number of jobs in the US. If manufacturing hadn't gone to China or India then the same number of jobs would have been lost to the machines instead.

But the really important lesson of all of this is that whatever happens to where production is done we're not, ever again, going to have mass employment in manufacturing. So much of it is now mechanised that it's always going to be a jobs-light sector of the economy and thus we're still faced with all of the problems of unemployment and low-paid service work whatever happens to where things are manufactured.